


if all I need is love

by beelzebubble_tea



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1990s, Dark Academia, England (Country), Ghosts, Libraries, M/M, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:01:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27183509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beelzebubble_tea/pseuds/beelzebubble_tea
Summary: There's a ghost haunting the university library, and he has a story to tell.
Relationships: Librarian/Library Ghost, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20
Collections: Shipoween 2020 - The Halloween Ship Exchange!





	if all I need is love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/gifts).



Thomas was sifting, breath held, through a mess of dust-blanketed boxes when he saw the article. _University Student Gone Missing_ —a Mr. Henry Corbyn, twenty-one and a literature major, class of 1949. Upon flipping through the next two months’ issues from that long-discontinued local newspaper and finding nothing more, Thomas found his curiosity piqued.

Intrigued by this small mystery, he began devoting more and more of his time to puzzling it apart. And he had ample time. There was no longer anyone in his life who could wish to spend time with him—and moreover, he was the warden of only the smallest, dustiest, and loneliest university library, and so was seldom disturbed by students searching for books or hoping to use the single blocky computer in the corner.

However, his search was not all peaceful. Often he found himself glimpsing movement or figure-like shadows when there was no one else in the library. More than once he sensed a presence behind him, only to turn around to see nothing but the books and their old wood shelves. Only when the rare student entered to browse the collection or—more likely—ask for directions did the odd occurrences cease.

As time passed, the feeling of being watched increased, and Thomas resorted to heaving his desk around to have his back safely against the wall. _Is this schizophrenia? The doctor did say veterans were at a higher risk_ …

One evening, as he was trying to use the Internet to scour for more information, a soft voice spoke into his ear.

“You needn't keep looking. I can tell you what happened.”

Thomas spun around. A handsome young man stood in front of him, with round glasses and loose curls and oddly faded-looking clothing. It took Thomas a moment to realize that the young man’s clothing wasn’t just faded, but translucent—and so was the rest of him.

“It was me who went missing,” said the ghost.

* * *

“His name was Leslie.” Henry Corbyn was sitting cross-legged on the windowsill, or perhaps merely floating in the space where he might have sat had he been corporeal. Golden sunlight streamed through his torso. “We were… friends. Good friends. And we were both literature majors, so we had quite a lot in common, at least at first.”

As Thomas listened, Henry told the tale of his and Leslie’s friendship, one that began in marble halls and wide grassy lawns and hidden alcoves. But their favorite retreat was this very library, where together they would read the classics: the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Georgics, Sappho’s poems and Cicero’s speeches. And they were inseparable.

But Henry’s story took a darker turn. Leslie found an old, weathered tome in the corner of the library, and he began to speak of strange and unsettling things, secrets and rituals and powerful ancient gods—things that Henry didn’t understand and was afraid to. He tried to be supportive of Leslie’s sudden obsession, and when his efforts revealed its horror, he tried to pull Leslie out.

It seemed to work. To all appearances, Leslie withdrew from the tome and again resembled the boy Henry knew. Everything was set to rights.

And yet.

Henry couldn’t shake the sense that something was off. Sometimes, Leslie’s laugh seemed just a tad forced, and when they debated over some classical text as they always did, his arguments were somehow passionless, lacking true conviction or excitement. One night, Leslie stopped pretending.

“I woke up,” Henry said. His eyes were on Thomas, but his gaze was distant, looking right through him as if he were the ghost. “And when I saw him standing over me, I knew immediately that something was wrong—his eyes, or something in his face, I couldn’t say. But I knew. He wasn’t looking at me like I was me. He wasn’t even looking at me like I was a stranger. He simply looked at me like I was… nothing.”

Thomas could say nothing, for his throat was frozen in dread. The ending of this story was all too evident.

“He choked me. I tried to resist, but I was muddled with sleep and lying horizontal besides, and I couldn’t do anything.” Henry’s voice was incongruously gentle, as if he were murmuring sweet nothings rather than telling the tale of his own death. “I expected to die right then, but I didn’t. Leslie… had something else planned.”

“What?” Thomas asked. It came out as a choked whisper.

Henry finally looked directly at Thomas. The colors of his body were all washed out, but Thomas thought his eyes were brown. “The moon was full. Leslie wanted to perform a ritual—for what, he didn’t tell me—and he needed a sacrifice. A human one.”

Thomas's stomach twisted.

“I woke up in the woods,” Henry continued, his calm voice rising at last. “There was rope around my wrists and ankles, and he’d taped my mouth so I couldn’t scream. He had candles, salt, some supposedly special crystals. He performed the ritual. I don’t know all what he did. I could see nothing through my tears, that I’m not ashamed to admit! Then—then. Then he killed me.” His voice tempered again, and he looked very small. “Why did he kill me? Why?”

“I—”

“Why did he do it?” Henry cried, bursting away from the window. Thomas jumped. “I loved him! More than anything else in the world. I thought he loved me too!” Thomas blinked in surprise, and Henry scowled at him as if daring him to say something. “But he was willing to _murder_ me for a ritual that didn’t even succeed. Why? Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said quietly. There was a tight, squeezing pain in his chest. “Some people do things that just don’t make sense.”

Henry slumped as he retreated back to the windowsill. “I know. I didn’t mean to yell. I’ve had thirty years to think about that question, and I still haven’t found an answer.”

“Almost fifty now, actually,” Thomas said. He tilted his head. “Why are you here? You know… haunting?”

“I suppose that is what I’m doing,” Henry mused. “I don’t know. I was dead. And then I wasn’t, and I was here. And I can’t leave.”

“Leslie!” Thomas said suddenly. “Is he—?”

“He’s dead.” Henry nodded in the direction of the newspaper archives. His eyes held an emotion Thomas couldn't decipher. “I read his obituary. He killed himself in 1952.”

Thomas thought, _Good._

* * *

Thomas spent yet more time at the library now that he knew Henry was there. Likewise, Henry made himself known more often than not, no longer shrinking into a shadowy wisp or an unnatural breeze. He hovered over Thomas’s shoulder as he reshelved books and offered commentary as he struggled with the blasted computer—though of course, Henry was even more baffled by the technology.

They grew close. Henry was eager to spill his thoughts and memories, likely aching for someone to talk with after all those years, and Thomas was equally grateful for human interaction. Often, Henry would be the only person Thomas spoke to for days.

He ended up showing Henry worn photographs of his troop back in the Middle East, and Henry pointed him to a poetry magazine in which his sonnets had been featured. Thomas brought in a stack of CDs and a CD player to introduce him to the wonders of modern music (The Beatles featured heavily). At Henry’s request, he plucked inexpertly at an old ukulele he’d picked up at a jumble sale and sang All You Need Is Love until his throat grew hoarse. In turn, Henry read translated epics to him—Thomas flipping the pages—though his light voice would sometimes break with the pain of memory.

Weeks passed, and summer turned to autumn, though inside the library it almost seemed like no time had gone by at all.

“I want to show you where I died,” Henry said abruptly. He’d just finished reading the last section of the Iliad, and this was quite out of the blue.

Thomas had been resting his head on his arms, drinking in the hazy shapes and lines of Henry’s face and the clear cadence of his voice. At the non sequitur, he sat up and furrowed his brows. “Where you died… Are you sure? It might bring up—memories.”

“I’m sure.”

With what little he knew about trauma, _Thomas_ wasn’t sure that it was a good idea, but Henry looked so determined and resolute that he couldn’t say no. And what did he know about ghost psychology, anyway? “All right, then. Show me.”

As they left the building, Henry hesitated at the threshold of the library’s oaken double doors. “You should know that I’m connected to the library. That’s why I can’t stay somewhere else. The farther I go, the more I fade.”

That was alarming. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll see what I mean. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt.” Henry jerked his head. “Go on. Towards the woods.”

Reluctantly, Thomas descended the steps and followed the cobblestone path towards the north of campus, where lay the dormitories and beyond that, a thick forest. As he headed away from the library, he thought he noticed Henry’s figure becoming fainter, smudging at the edges. When the effect became unmistakable, Thomas stopped walking.

“What’s happening to you?” he demanded.

“I told you not to worry.” Henry’s voice was tiny and distant, and his features were beginning to blur. He looked like a watercolor painting with too much water. “You won’t be able to see me, but I’ll still be here. I think I can still speak to you.”

Thomas stared at Henry’s muted image. “You’ve done this before?”

“Loads of times, when I first found myself as a ghost. So stop your fretting.” His expression looked vaguely fond. “I’ve gone farther than this, you know. Come on.”

Pressing his lips together, Thomas continued down the path towards the dormitories. It was that bleak late stage of autumn when most of the leaves had already fled their branches, but snow had not yet fallen to blanket those naked trees. The air was sharp and cold. When Thomas came to a halt at the edge of campus, he could already no longer see Henry.

“Which way am I going?” he asked, instead of what he really wanted to say, which was _Are you **sure** you’re all right?_

A breeze rustled through his hair, carrying a thin, faint voice. “Left… Walk until you reach a clearing.”

Thomas descended the slight hill and trekked through the yellow-brown grass that rose up to his knees. Henry’s voice guided him through the trees, cutting in and out of hearing like a radio that wasn’t quite tuned into the right frequency. Twigs creaked and grass shifted beneath his feet.

At last, Thomas came to the clearing. Leaves littered the ground, rust-brown and brittle, and grey sunlight dripped weakly through the opening in the canopy.

“This is it,” Henry whispered. “This is where he killed me.”

Thomas gazed at the clearing for a moment, a chill sliding down his spine. This was the place where, fifty years prior, Henry had died. Thomas was no stranger to death, had probably inflicted it during his time overseas, but exchanging fire with faraway uniformed soldiers was a far cry from facing your lover on the wrong end of a knife. Unwillingly, he imagined it—Leslie dragging Henry through the woods, waking up here with his limbs tied and his mouth taped, the horrible ritual and Henry’s tears and the utter terror he must have felt at the end.

Only it hadn’t really been the end, had it?

“My body isn’t here,” Henry said.

Thomas circled the clearing, footsteps stirring up leaves and grass and revealing a glimpse of metal—a candleholder jutting from the dirt. “Where is it?”

“This way.” A swirl of cool air swept around his shoulders and towards his right. Thomas followed Henry’s directions away from the clearing until he arrived at, by all appearances, a wholly unremarkable spot. “There, in that tree. There’s a hollow in the base of the trunk.”

Of course Leslie hadn’t given him a proper burial. Thomas couldn’t resist asking this time. “Are you sure you want me to uncover it?”

Henry was silent, and Thomas briefly wondered if he was now too far from the library to be heard.

“It’s mine,” he said finally. “It’s—me. I don’t know.”

“No, it’s all right.” Thomas wished Henry were corporeal so he could reassure him with a touch, but the air around him was ever empty. “I’ll do it.”

He dropped to his knees in front of the tree trunk and began pushing aside the forest debris that nearly obscured the gap in the base. The ground was wet with mulch. Damp seeped through the fabric of his slacks. Thomas closed his eyes, taking a deep breath, and brushed away the last of the debris.

Bones. After fifty years, only bones remained in the hollow of the trunk, femurs and ribs and vertebrae and a skull with leaves filling its eye sockets. They were embedded in the dirt, but the figure they formed was clearly visible—the arms thrown haphazardly over the head, the legs shoved in and scrunched up without ceremony. No, Leslie had not bothered with a proper burial at all.

“This is your body,” Thomas said, not knowing if it was a statement or a question. The sight was unsettling, but not as nausea-inducing as he’d thought. It was just bones. Not a fellow soldier slumped to the ground, not a day-old corpse beginning to attract crows, not rotting flesh and bloated organs. Just bones.

“It was,” Henry responded quietly.

Thomas took another breath and looked fruitlessly around for Henry before returning his eyes to the skeleton. “We should bury you. Bury it. Properly.”

“… All right.” Wind ruffled Thomas’s scarf. “I… would like that.”

Thomas pulled off his jacket and spread it out next to the tree, then gingerly dug the skull out of the dirt and set it on top of his jacket. He did the same for the rest of the bones, plucking out even the tiniest pieces he found and laying them by the others. To his surprise, he found a rusted belt buckle by the spine and collected that as well. The breeze that was Henry tickled Thomas’s face and hands as he worked. When he could find nothing more inside the hollow, he gathered up his jacket and its contents into a clattering bundle.

“Where should I…?”

Henry was silent, thinking. “Follow me,” he said. Thomas followed Henry’s gentle tugs to a glade surrounded by tall, lean aspens. “Here.”

Though the branches of the aspens were close to bare, and the ground beneath the scraggly brown grass hard and lifeless, Thomas could see that the glade would be beautiful in the spring, when the grass sprang to life and the trees budded with lush green leaves. “A good spot,” he said.

They returned the next day, Thomas carrying a shovel over his shoulder. He stopped near a dormitory building, before Henry faded out of sight, and swallowed dryly. “Will this… Will you be—at peace, then?”

“You mean, will I be gone?” Henry drifted closer to Thomas, eyes hazy but intent on his. “No, I don’t think so. After all, I’m happy here.” He smiled so warmly and tenderly that there was no mistaking the affection in his eyes, and Thomas wished he were corporeal for an entirely different reason.

“So am I,” he said thickly, adjusting the shovel against his shoulder. “So am I.”

He went the rest of the way to the glade and found a decent spot for the burial. Setting the satchel gently down and planting his shovel in the ground, Thomas cast another useless glance around for Henry then said, “Right then. Here I go.”

The ground did not yield easily to the tip of the shovel, and Thomas had to hack away at it with all his strength. _I’m out of shape_ , he thought. Well, he wasn’t in the army anymore, so that was no surprise. In the end, it took Thomas nearly seven hours over the course of two weekends to dig a depression deep and wide enough to lay Henry’s bones in without stacking them atop one another. His back ached like hell. After tossing aside the last scoop of dirt, Thomas took from his satchel an anatomical diagram and painstakingly arranged the bones in the hole, doing his best to place the various little phalanges and vertebrae in the correct positions.

“Does that look right?” he asked Henry. He scratched his head as he peered at the skeletal hands.

“I majored in literature, not biology,” came the faint, teasing reply. “Don’t fuss over the details… You’ve already done more than enough for me.”

“As you say.” Thomas sat back on his heels, wincing as a dozen joints took the opportunity to pop and crack. He reached into his satchel and pulled out the last item at the bottom of the bag: a leather-bound copy of the Iliad, wrapped in plastic. “And finally, this…”

He hadn’t wanted to bury Henry’s bones with a reminder of the one who killed him, but Henry had insisted. _It’s not his_ , he'd said. _He doesn’t own that part of me. It’s mine, it’s mine._

Thomas carefully set the book in the cradle of those skeletal arms and climbed to his feet to shovel the displaced soil over the bones. Thankfully, this took a fraction of the time it had taken for him to dig the hole. Soon, he was smoothing over the dirt on top. There was only a small, unassuming mound and a patch devoid of grass to hint that Henry’s remains were buried there.

“Let’s put some grass over it for now,” Thomas suggested. “And in the spring, all sorts of plants will grow here.”

“I’d like that,” said Henry. Thomas scattered some loose grass over the mound so that it nearly blended in entirely with the rest of the glade, then stood back to admire his handiwork, Henry a pleased caress of wind against his face.

“Good?” he asked.

Henry whispered, “Perfect.”

* * *

The sun swam through the white-grey clouds as they returned to the library. Henry coalesced back into his usual washed-out but visible self, and in Thomas’s peripheral vision he almost seemed like a living, solid boy. For a moment he wished it were true, then he shook his head. If Henry were indeed alive and solid, wouldn’t they never have met?

“I have to thank you,” Henry said softly. “You see—I still don’t know the answer to that question. Why he killed me.”

Thomas opened his mouth, but Henry held up a translucent hand to forestall his response. “But the thing is—I don’t think about it anymore, Tom, not like I used to. Now this may sound a bit trite, and maybe it is, but… I don’t think I really need an answer.”

“I’m glad,” Thomas replied, heart clenching with something both painful and wonderful. He cleared his throat. “After all, love is all you need.”

Henry laughed. Even with his colors leeched away by death, he was so beautiful that Thomas had to swallow a lump in his throat at the sight. “If all I need is love, then I’ve everything, don’t I?”

Thomas blinked rapidly at the unexpected stinging in his eyes. “Well. You have me, if that’s enough.”

“It’s enough,” Henry said firmly. “By God, it’s enough." He smiled, cheek dimpling, and brushed his hand through Thomas's. "Come on, then.”

The two, man and ghost, disappeared into the university’s smallest and dustiest library. But it was no longer the loneliest.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of fun writing this, so I hope you liked it! <3


End file.
